It ended with a bang not a whimper when he departed. Questions flew over the internet, attempting to discover who the tweeter responsible for @mayoremanuel was. The Chicago Tribune‘s editorial board went so far as to plead with him to stay.

Last Monday he was finally revealed as Columbia College professor Dan Sinker, in an article by Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic Monthly. Sinker, the former founder of the zine “Punk Planet”, claimed he didn’t know why he started tweeting, as he told the Atlantic Monthly:

“I remember I was at home. I think everyone had gone to bed. And I remembered, ‘Oh, I have that account. This might be kind of funny.'”

Sinker did irk local reporters by revealing his identity to a writer from outside the Chicago market. Sinker explained why he went about it the way in an interview with Esquire:

[Alexis Madrigal] wrote back with a pretty funny reply, and then included his e-mail address. I thought about it for a while. I knew that I really needed the hunt for me to be over, and so I set up an anonymous e-mail account and started fking with him for a day basically.

The story concluded, not with @mayoremanuel fading away, but with Sinker and Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel meeting. The promised $5000 was presented to Sinker which will be used towards Young Chicago Authors

A hero has passed this evening and the world is a sorrier place for it.

There are few joys stemming from election season: sound bites, a continual barrage of campaign ads, empty promises…

In this season of loathing, there has been a shining-light of hope: Mayor Emanuel. No, not the recently minted mayor-elect, the Tweeter @MayorEmanuel. A true hero who carried on a companion dialogue to Rahm Emanuel’s campaign, 140 characters at a time.

Unfortunately for fans and readers, according to what may be his final tweet, @MayorEmanuel has faded away–to Journey no less.

Even as late as this morning, the Chicago Tribune offered an editorial, imploring @mayoremanuel to continue.

@MayorEmanuel, if you’re listening: Please don’t [stop]. The fun is just beginning, and the mystery is almost as delicious as the tweets themselves.

The recently minted real mayor-elect of Chicago even went so far as to offer $5000 to the choice of @MayorEmanuel’s charity on the Roe and Roeper Show, as was annotated on CBS.com.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do,” Emanuel said on the Roe and Roeper show on WLS Radio. “After the election, I am offering a donation to the charity of that gentleman or woman’s choice, if they would come forward and identify themselves.”

Around 8 P.M. this evening the fun appears to have come to an end. After a day of mooning around the city and lolling at favorite stops, the song Separate Ways by Journey came onto the radio in the Civic.

And in a what appears a final act, @MayorEmanuel danced in the streets.

Perhaps it is fitting to recall General Douglas MacCarthur, who likewise lifted a speech from a ballad in his exit speech.

Radiohead returns with a new album, The King of Limbs, this Saturday. In a similar fashion to In Rainbows, their 2007 release, the new album will be released on their website. A standard CD will be available on March 28 in record stores in collaboration with XL Recordings. A “Newspaper Album” will be available will be available May 9.

Radiohead have set aside the “pay what you want” patronage model that dominated the conversation surrounding the In Rainbows release, yet have retained that album’s more important business aspects … Once again, we all know exactly when we’re first able to hear a new Radiohead record and therefore will largely all experience it together, something almost completely lost in today’s pop music landscape.

Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune reports on the physical albums which will be following in March and May.

Special-edition physical copies of the album – advertised as the “world’s first Newspaper Album” — will be made available through the Web site May 9, for $48 (with MP3 download) or $53 (with WAV download), that include a CD, two 10-inch vinyl records and extensive artwork.

According to Radiohead’s website, the “Newspaper” version will consist of:

Two clear 10″ vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.

A compact disc.

Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.

In movies the good guy doesn’t die, but there’s always one last stumbling block for Good Guy to overcome.

After overcoming insurmountable odds, seemingly stealing victory from the jaws of defeat, Evil Emperor Bad Jones arrives, throwing Good Guy into a fresh new layer of hell.

Things look grim for Good Guy as Evil Emperor Bad Jones lords over him, no doubt explaining all the ways Good Guy failed and is surely about to die.

And yet, in that moment of despair, with darkness ensconcing our hero, something happens–something always happens.

The Good Guy wins!

[credits]

This isn’t the case with typical life. Dinosaurs are dinosaurs and everything will go the way of the dodo bird.

And yet, while the music industry is down or stagnant, vinyl sales continue to rise. According to Nielsen Soundscan, vinyl records are up 14 percent in 2010, continuing to rise over the past three years.

Vinyl was bolstered by classic albums being re-released, but three of the top five records sold were new releases. Including the Grammy winner for Best Album of the Year, Arcade Fire’sThe Suburbs.

The death of the vinyl album was pronounced in 1983, when Sony/Phillips first introduced the compact disc. The CD bragging quality and pure fidelity. For the next five years, as the cost of CD players dropped, Rolling Stone continued publishing articles stating vinyl was dead.

Ten years after the introduction of the CD, collectors found the death of vinyl to be widely exaggerated.

In 1993, two years after Soundscan began keeping track of vinyl sales, Rolling Stone changed their tune. As Wired pointed out in a 2007 article, vinyl may be the final nail in the CD’s coffin.

MP3s, the supposed usurper of the CD and with a heavy dose of irony, now have software and hardware to transpose digital versions of records to your iPod, as reported by Connected Home.

Records were originally constructed as a means of listening to the dead, as John Durham Peters points out in his book Speaking into the Air. Now it’s the same raspy recordings which audiophiles crave keeping records alive.